


burials

by SkadizzleRoss



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Domestic, Inverted Husbands, M/M, Neil is Not a Morning Person, POV The Protagonist (Tenet), Past Character Death, Temporal Booty Call
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 15:33:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29404137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkadizzleRoss/pseuds/SkadizzleRoss
Summary: Non-linear romance still has its challenges for the Protagonist. During a quiet moment, he takes an inventory of Neil's backpack.
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 39





	burials

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on the notion of The Protagonist moving forward in time from Stalsk-12, and Neil moving backward from several years in the future towards Kiev. Neil makes the occasional pitstop from Interminable Inversion Hell to visit with The Protag and catch some R&R.
> 
> Thanks to brainstorming buddy [CosmosCorpse!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmoscorpse)

_Amsterdam_

He wakes bathed in sunlight.

Which is… weird. The places he sleeps don’t tend to have windows. And when they do, he isn’t sleeping past daybreak.

He reaches out to touch the bright tousle of hair spilling over the pillow in front of him. A mess, as usual. Clumped with the lazy attempt at a finger-combing Neil had given it before collapsing headlong into bed.

Sam practically had to carry him out of the shower, loose-limbed and thoroughly fucked-out. Neil draped him in every gangly inch of himself with a comfort that still leaves Sam disoriented. 

This is a Neil that’s a little younger with every meeting. A Neil still on the long trip back to Kiev, a Neil that knows a _future_ Sam far better than the stranger that keeps stumbling in the door whenever he’s summoned.

This is his second visit to this strange Amsterdam hideaway, a place where time stands still for the both of them. 

He can’t unsee it as some kind of purgatory. 

Which is stupid, because he can’t even decide what he should be repenting for: staying here, slipping into a place that isn’t his, or letting Neil keep moving upstream.

It’s a cheat. Stumbling into the end of a romance, instead of the beginning. Neil looks at him with a trust that has Sam’s gut twisting into some impossible knot and—

Well.

It’s hard to get himself to shut up, sometimes. 

He presses a kiss to the nape of Neil’s neck, listens to him shift and mumble, resisting consciousness with a full-bodied flop of his limbs.

That’s fine.

Sam unwinds from the sheets and drops onto hardwood, pleasantly warm - a nice change of pace from concrete. He’s been tied up in securing their hold on a new turnstile the past few weeks, stolen from Sator’s crumbling empire. 

A snake without a head. Things get lost in the shuffle, as they try to reaffirm their holdings. Tenet makes _sure_ things get lost in the shuffle. They’ve expanded significantly in the past few months, getting into a solid position to provide the resources they needed for Stalsk-12.

He’ll spend the rest of his life assuring the victory he’s already won. How long that vigil is going to be, well… He glances back towards the sleeping man on the bed, pale skin a patchwork of old scars. He hasn’t asked how far back Neil’s traveled from. He hasn’t asked why he’s coming back alone.

He pads through into the kitchen, sorting through the pile of dishes from the night before: sauce congealed to a thick mess around the edges of the pan. They’d gotten - distracted, after dinner.

He sets the hot water running while he moves through the cabinets, tracking down coffee, filters, coffee maker. The logistics team stocks this place, and their coffee of choice seems to be a pre-ground breakfast blend with dancing goats on the label.

Smells like coffee, anyway.

He pours a few tablespoons into the coffeemaker and goes to scrub their sins off the pile of dishes in the sink. He arrays everything in the rack above the sink to dry, bears his knuckles into the counter and rocks onto his toes: staring out at a modest living room, tasteful artwork, hodgepodge furniture clearly pieced together out of thrift stores and rummage sales.

He pauses in his roaming study when he sees the backpack leaning against a scuffed leather armchair. That old coin dangling by a red string.

Can’t be a good luck charm, can it? Sure as hell didn’t work.

Won’t work.

He glances towards the bed: Neil, unmoved, one outcast hand still dangling in open air. 

Sam crosses the floor on soft footfalls. He hesitates when his fingers brush the backpack handle: frayed fabric, softened by time. He grips it tight and lifts it into the armchair.

He’s thought about the backpack a lot.

For the obvious reasons - those tried-and-true useless nightmares, reliving the same scenes again and again, watching the inevitable again and again and again—

He went back to Stalsk-12, after. Pulled a quiet favor with Sir Michael. The place was overrun with inverted hotspots: the heavily-used routes lighting up like Christmas, but the occasional off-target pinpoints, too. A cluster of rocks piled on the ledge overlooking the turnstile, clinging to the last dregs of a passing entropy; waiting to fall in reverse.

There was no getting into the hypocenter. A tomb, now. But only for one man; the other... was gone. Neil’s body kept on traveling into the past, while Volkov’s went on to rot. Neil and whatever Neil had on him was probably recovered by Sator’s men, a foreshadowing of the coming fight.

Sam expects Sator read it as a success: if people came to fight this moment, then it had to be an important one.

The backpack continued on, too, of course, waiting to be dragged up by a carelessly cruel hand.

He has to know that nothing important passed into Sator’s possession with Neil’s body.

So he begins to piece through it, memorizing the arrangement as he goes. The outer pockets are largely practical: passport, IDs, some money. More IDs and a few more euros hidden in a careful tear in the pocket lining. A lockpicking set in a black canvas case, meticulously clean and professional-grade. Zip ties, rope. What he’d expect. 

He unzips the main compartment.

There’s a roll of cloth tied with string, placed on top. He unrolls it to find a fabric chess board. Plastic mimics of ebony and ivory pieces clatter together in his palm as he shakes them loose. He wraps them back up, sets it aside.

Under that, a brick of an MP3 player, earbuds looped tightly around it. He hasn’t seen one of this vintage in years. It’s thick enough he almost expects to pop it open and find a cassette tape. But the screen lights up, paused halfway through something called _RITUALS - MAINLAND - VILLAINS EP._

There’s a pieced-together first aid kit: scissors, morphine syrettes, ace bandage, hemostats, gauze, tampons. 

Three decks of cards, bound together with rubber bands. 

Socks. A lot of socks. Enough that he’s getting exasperated with himself for snooping; but they’re there, it turns out, to muffle a skinny shoebox.

He lifts the box out slow and pries the lid loose with his fingernails. Snorts under his breath as its contents nearly spill over his hands and onto the floor. The box is overflowing with hard candies - the kind a grandmother would favor - and a hoard of Army-issue MRE desserts: lemon poundcake and apple turnovers, mostly, still in their crackling foil wrapping.

He gets the lid back on - somehow - and sets it aside. At the bottom of the bag, there’s two things: a small leather case, and a book.

The book is one he’s never heard of. A battered paperback, something about ‘distant worlds’ and ‘vast empires’ according to the overly-dramatic synopsis on the back cover. No author he’s heard of, either, and he wonders how they’d turn up if he did a search: some up-and-coming novella author? Or some no-name kid in Jersey? Can’t know until he searches; the author page has been torn out, along with the copyright pages.

There’s no penciled inscription, no annotations. It’s just a well-worn book: read a dozen times or more, judging by the cracked and faded spine.

The leather case is another lock picking set, this one well-worn. The rakes and picks have been worn down to nubs, the torsion wrench bent and straightened a dozen ways from years of overuse.

This, Sam thinks, is an original piece of Neil. Something he could find on the Neil Harper that haunts the streets of the London East End, these days. Bought for a paltry price in some pawn shop, maybe, or inherited from whatever criminally-minded mentor got him started down the road that would lead him to Tenet.

Somewhere, sometime, someone gave Neil the skill that would save the world. Sam feels something like selfish relief, knowing it wasn’t him.

Definitely wasn’t him: he’s shit with locks, for the most part. Can get through them in a pinch, but never without a frustration tightening up the back of his throat.

He folds the picks carefully away, returns everything to its place. One more burial, in lieu of the real act.

The book might be a concern. The MP3 player, too. But the rest of it’s just the tools of a soldier.

(And that.... That was Sam’s doing, he’s fairly sure. One of these days he won’t have a choice but to drag that kid out of the East End, throw him into war.)

He considers turning back: seven months, it’s not so far. 

He considers fighting through Sator’s people one last time, taking the place of one of them, maybe. It was only Volkov down there, and only minutes before. If he could slip between when Volkov placed the tripwire and when he dropped into the hypocenter, if he could work the lock and grab Neil and drag his body free - 

Or if he could get there _hours_ before, take Neil from wherever they dragged him to.

It isn’t worth the risk, he knows. It doesn’t matter.

Just a body.

Just a backpack, nothing worthy of concern. He knows that now.

But he had Neil in his _hand._

He had the backpack: he reached through the bars and paused, staring at the gold coin, the red thread: that cold dread blooming slow, understanding ticking away slow at the back of his mind.

The thought keeps coming back: _I had him in my hand._

_Had him..._

Neil looked him in the eye through the bars as blood and bone furled. As he was torn back to life.

There’s a dead man in his dreams: an inevitably that has and hasn’t happened.

Sam blinks down at the dull bite of fingernails into his palm, forces himself back a step from the backpack lying on the floor. 

_It’ll balance,_ Neil told him, their first time here.

But that cuts both ways, doesn’t it? Does that mean all this has a price? A place like home, a place where he can _return to,_ where his old name tumbles off a lover’s lips. 

Things he was never supposed to have, things he’ll pay for in full.

He forces himself back another step from this, from the past, from Stalsk-12 and _let me go_ and a face masked in blood. 

Another step back, and another. Sam forces his muscles loose and sets the past back on a high shelf in his mind. His balky joints finally free up, as he turns back to the kitchen and sets himself back into banal motions: hunting down two mugs, digging through the fridge for half-and-half, through the cabinets for sugar. 

He doesn’t know how Neil takes his coffee, but based on that shoebox, he goes for two spoonfuls of sugar and a healthy dose of cream.

He sets the coffee on the bedside table, watches the steam rise and curl in the golden light. Then he takes Neil’s outstretched wrist gently in his fingers, feeling the steady pulse there. 

He traces the subtle lines of tendon and bone up, through forearm, over elbow and to the curve of his shoulder; down the subtle hollow of his collarbone and to the steadier pulse of his throat. Lets his thumb fall over the rough texture of his unshaven cheek.

Neil exhales a slow waking, twists to press his lips to Sam’s palm without opening his eyes. Easy, unthinking.

Sam tamps down envy and slings a leg across Neil, straddling him.

“You,” Neil murmurs, opening his eyes slow, “are not wearing a damn thing.”

“Neither are you.”

He arches his back in a slow stretch, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips as he lifts a thigh to graze purposefully against him. “What a fascinating coincidence.”

 _I haven’t read this book,_ Sam almost blurts out. Neil’s reaching for, and Sam is _afraid—_ afraid of the has and hasn’t.

But he’s easing into the warmth of it, bit by bit. Following Neil’s steady tidal pull.

* * *

Eight months on from Stalsk-12, Sam visits his office for the first time: one of a dozen, and none of them approaching something like _permanency_ in the fluid realities of Tenet’s physical holding, but this one has a welcoming present. Something wrapped in brown paper.

Wheeler looks at it. Looks at him, and rolls a shoulder in a small shrug. “Been checked. It’s a gift.”

Then she’s out the door, leaving Sam to stand there and stare at it.

He moves forward - swaying from one hip to another as the cargo ship shifts underneath him - and picks up the package, turning it over in his hands. There’s a familiar, untidy scrawl of _Boss_ across the paper.

He falls back into the chair, opening it slow.

The MP3 player falls into his hand. The plastic scuffed, the screen. Sam finds himself wondering once again just how old this thing is.

He presses the wrapping paper flat, reading the note there.

 _Take good care of it,_ a dead man wrote. _I think you’ll find some past-and-future favorites._

He turns the weight of the MP3 player over in his hand, letting the pieces fall into place. Thinks about passing it on to Neil, years from now. Because he will, won’t he? He’ll send Neil back with this. Something to keep him company on the long road back. And in the days before Stalsk, Neil will wrap it up and leave it here.

How many trips has it made?

A paradox all its own.

One last thread, cinching the loop up tight.

Sam burns the paper. 

Then he unwraps the headphones slow and squints at the gouged plastic screen, barely legible.

Somewhere, Neil’s traveling back to Kiev, to Stalsk-12, to a lover that will look at him like a stranger in a sweltering Mumbai bar. Maybe he’s lying on a cot with this antiquated brick clasped in his hand, tapping a foot idly to the rhythm only he can hear.

They’re nothing but passing ships, but for now, Sam can slip the headphones on, prop his feet up, and hit _Shuffle._

Listen to the music, for a time.

**Author's Note:**

> Every once and awhile Sam comes across some absolutely ATROCIOUS music, courtesy of Neil. Sam is never 100% sure if Neil's fucking with him or not.


End file.
